I have just spent some time reading through a bloggers blog, it wasn't/isn't easy reading, though it has its humourous moments even if they are dark and dangerous moments for ordinary people to venture in...
I do not pretend to have been to the places that this man has been, nor do I pretend to fully understand the reality that he paints for whoever may happen upon his written words. I do however feel a kinship with him, for I too have known dark humour and black moments of time in my own life. The more I read the more I identified with the writer, and my understanding has grown from this contact.
It is all too easy for the ordinary person to not see the reality this man lived and still lives, some years ago I studied the First World War poets and their graphically detailed accounts of the horrors they lived through and with. I never thought to see their like again, as the writers of that era were the poets and writers of their generation (mostly lost to the inevitable end in those days), but this writer has chimed those chords, a modern day experience of the same futility and frustrations that were apparent in the earlier writers.
I wish to applaud this writer and his work, though I am sure he seeks none from me or anyone else, he writes for himself, to exorcise his own demons and the honesty and sincerity with which he weaves the pictures of his life and trials is a refreshing, if difficult to experience, change from todays ordinary world.
If you would see what Tony Blair and his like have done to our young men and women in the armed forces ( if only some of them) then go and read his stuff. Read it and maybe shed a tear for the lost who may never find themselves again. Was there any need for this man's pain? Was there a real reason to subject this man and others like him to the unremitting terrors of war, for if the only reasons were commercial and to line the pockets of bankers and politicians then the price was too high, and I have one more reason in every soldier who suffers like this man to hate Tony Blair!
